Side Hustle Pro

Side Hustle Pro spotlights bold black women entrepreneurs who have scaled from side hustle to profitable business. Join Chief Side Hustler turned full-time entrepreneur Nicaila Matthews Okome for your weekly installment of Side Hustle Pro and learn actionable strategies to start small and get going–wherever and whoever you are. Side Hustle Pro features interviews with inspiring black women entrepreneurs including interviews with Myleik Teele of CurlBox, Lisa Price of Carol's Daughter, Nicole Walters of The Monetized Life, Maya Elious of Built to Impact, and more!

How did the product of a once homeless single mother become the Founder and CEO of a rising startup?This week’s guest, Stephanie Lampkin, shares how an influential aunt led her to coding at a young age, setting the stage for her to graduate from Stanford and MIT Sloan.

Later, a surprise rejection from Google would lead her to found Blendoor, a mobile job matching app that hides candidate name and photo to circumvent unconscious bias and facilitate diversity recruiting in tech companies. Blendoor’s goal is to highlight the information that's most relevant to a candidate being a "good fit" independent of race, gender, military history or sexual orientation.

In this this episode, Stephanie breaks down:

How she determined what kind of business structure to set up

The art of the “pitch”

How she approaches pitching on stage vs pitching for investors

How to build a team as an early stage company

How she keeps the company lean and financially sustains herself as an entrepreneur

Find out about Stephanie’s experience founding not one, but two startups and her journey to Silicon Valley in this episode.

The number one question I get asked is how to leverage social media to build a brand. When people ask me this, I know that they're really searching for a quick and dirty shortcut to get thousands of followers without having to put in a lot of work.

Well I hate to break it to you, but there's no way to build an engaged social media audience without consistent and authentic effort.

With over seven years of professional experience as a social media marketing strategist, I've learned firsthand the challenges that come with trying to keep up with changing platforms and algorithms. If you want to be successful in social media, you have to abandon the 'I want to make something that will go viral’ mentality because that's not how it works.

On this episode, I'm providing a detailed blueprint for how to grow an active and engaged social media following. I'm going to go over step by step what I've done to grow my own social media accounts and I'll provide a full checklist of resources to measure and grow your social channels, but don't worry, you don't need to take a lot of notes because I've created a downloadable freebie for this episode. So if you go to sidehustlepro.co/episode7 you can see the show notes from this episode and get the FREE step by step checklist for the Side Hustle Pro Social Media Toolkit.

My special guest on this episode is Muoyo Okome, Founder of Daily Spark Media & the Daily Spark Entrepreneur Community, who details how he was able to grow his account from a little under 600 followers to 25,000 in less than a year by studying his Instagram insights. He used the data on the most liked and most commented posts to plan his content strategy and explode his social media audience.

What goes into the making of a YouTube personality? CeeDotCee is this episode’s special guest. Whether it's recapping the latest episode of Love & Hip Hop or reviewing the hottest new music and gossip in pop culture, CeedotCee is an all around entertainer. Trailblazing the internet with her hilarious videos from YouTube to Facebook, she has over four million views combined. Her hilarious videos, like her Beyonce lemonade recap have garnered the attention of the likes of PEOPLE magazine. As if her talent in front of the camera isn't already enough, she also has skills behind the camera as a videographer and editor for various artists such as Chrisette Michele, Mya and Keke Palmer. If you haven't heard of her yet, now is the time to become a member of the rapidly growing "Cee Hive." In this episode she breaks down: How to create and build a brand as a YouTube personality Why you don’t need expensive equipment to have successful YouTube channel How to stand out in the crowded YouTube space The secret ingredient that accelerated her Facebook and YouTube following How she’s paying the bills and keeping the lights on as an entrepreneur Connect with CeeDotCee: YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ceedotceeTV Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CeeHive Twitter: https://twitter.com/ceedotcee Snapchat: CeeDotSnaps